Highway Pegs for Concours

The last few long trips have left me with aching thighs and thinking how nice it would be to have an alternate position to rest my feet now and then.

Craig Nedrow of Bay Machine Works advertises a Highway Peg kit for the Concours. Craig was easy to contact and deal with by email and my kit arrived in a few days. Unfortuntely, Craig seems to have moved, or at least changed Internet providers, as I no longer have working contact information for him.

What Craig supplies is a set of mounting brackets that fit on the front of the bike (replacing the radiator hanger bolts) and protrude through the front side fairings. Standard Connie footpegs will fit on the brackets, but Craig’s kit does not include the pegs. I stole my passenger pegs and ordered replacements for them from my dealer.

I found installing this kit fairly simple, but a bit intimidating, especially since it involved drilling through the fairing. Any time I’m nervous about mechanical work I keep a photo record, so here are the detailed steps to installation. This isn’t necessarily the best or only approach, but it worked for me.

Warning

I am not a mechanic or a representative of any motorcycle or tool manufacturer or anything else official. This page is only my notes on doing this procedure myself. Although I believe what I have documented here is correct, I make no promises and you do this at your own risk.

Let me make something clearer since I’ve received a couple of unexpected emails: I do not sell motorcycle parts or equipment. I can’t sell you these pegs or anything else. I’m just a rider like you. Please stop sending me price quote requests and orders.

Here’s what arrives in the package from Craig. The long cylinders are the standoffs that replace the radiator hanger bolts and pass through holes in the fairing. The polished brackets attach to the standoffs with the large screws. The black strips are weatherstripping for the holes you make in the fairing.

Remove the belly pan.

Remove the lower front fairings, both sides.

Here’s naked Connie.

Next you have to remove the “lower heat shield”. It’s not easy to see in this photo, but its position is marked in yellow. Three phillips screws hold it in place.

Here’s the heat shield coming off. Remove the one on the other side too.

The heat shield is just heavy plastic, and we’ll need to cut a bit of it away in a moment.

It comes off with a 14 mm socket. This is not a stressed member, and isn’t very tight. Nothing falls off the bike when you remove it.

Here is the removed bolt and the standoff that will replace it.

Put a standoff in the hole vacated by the bolt and snug it up, but don’t bring it to final tightness since you’ll need to remove it again.A 19 mm open-end wrench will turn the standoff by the recess milled into the large end.

Try to put the heat shield back and mark where the standoff interferes with it. Cut the offending bits away until it can be reinstalled (see below).

I did the first bit of material removal with a hacksaw, removing a wedge highlighted in yellow here.

Here’s the first piece cut out of the heat shield.

Test-fit it again and see what still needs to be removed.

As the shape was getting more complicated, I switched to a grinding bit held in a flex-shaft tool (Foredom or Dremel.) Craig’s instructions say he likes to use an end-mill held in a drill press. You’re just nibbling plastic, so it’s not very difficult.

(By the way, this spinning cutter does a great job on fingers. Note that you never see my right hand in the photos below. The band-aids are not pretty.)

Here’s the hole, modified some more. Test-fit and repeat, removing a little material at a time, until it will fit around the standoff.

My left-side shield ended up looking like this.The right-side procedure was the same, but the shape was somewhat different, so you definitely want to do these jobs one at a time — don’t try to take short cuts.

Re-install the heat shield, which now wraps neatly around the standoff.

Heat shield and standoff in place.

Now the heart-wrenching part. You need to drill a 1-1/2″ hole in the fairing for the standoff to pass through.Craig gives measurements of approximately where this hole should go. I marked out a 2″ square on the inside, showing approximately where the hole would be.

Remove the standoff. Wrap the blunt end of a 6″ pencil in duct tape and it will thread into the mounting hole quite nicely (note the threads that have been pressed into the tape). Gently install the fairing and the pencil will mark the exact spot for the hole on the inside.

Use a hole saw to cut a 1″ hole through the fairing

Here’s the 1″ hole. I test-fitted this to confirm it was in the right position (it was) then used a 1-1/2″ hole saw to enlarge it to its final size.

Trim the supplied weather stripping to length and install it around the inside edge of the new hole.Here in Ottawa, the material was quite stiff on the cold night I did this. I heated it by sitting it in the protective cage of my halogen work lamp for a minute and it softened up and became easy to bend.

Re-install the standoff and tighten it. (The angle of the milled face does not matter as it has no supporting role.) Then reinstall the fairing.Here is the fairing fitted over the standoff, and you can just see the weather stripping guarding the perimeter of the hole.

Next you put the polished bracket on the standoff with the supplied screw and a 6mm hex wrench (not supplied).

The bracket has a top and bottom. The hole on the top side is counterbored, while the hole on the bottom side is straight through. Install with the bracket tipping forward about 20 degrees.Late Note: In my first long ride, I found these screws quite vulnerable to engine vibration, and had to re-tighten them on the road. Install with a generous helping of loc-tite.

Now you need foot pegs. I took my passenger pegs off by removing the spring clip from the clevis pin.

The peg consists of the main unit, two steel brackets (one attached to a shaft with a spring), a pin, and a spring clip.

Re-install into the new front bracket. If you lose track of what pieces go where (I did) Craig has provided detailed instructions.

Better still (being smarter on the other side of the bike) hold the entire unit together when you remove it and transfer it directly to the front mounting position.

Use an old #1 phillips screwdriver through the hole to align all the parts.

Insert the clevis pin.

On one side I needed to use a precision part alignment tool, shown here, while the other side fit with no effort at all.

The C-pin is held in place with the spring clip, not visible here.

Reassemble fairings, belly pan, and so on, and you are done. Here is the new peg in its retracted position.Repeat as appropriate on the other side of the bike.

Here is the peg folded back not in use, . . .

And its riding position. (The weather stripping for the rear of the fairing isn’t re-installed yet in this photo.)

Nice piece of work, Craig, thanks.

Update: On one long trip last year, I went to put my feet on the pegs and discovered I had no right peg. The c-clip had come off, and the mounting pin vibrated out of the hole.

I bought a cheap set of round aluminum sportbike pegs to replace the pegs shown above. More important, I drilled a 1/16″ hole through the Clevis pins, below the channel for the C-clip, and put a cotter pin through each Clevis pin after mounting, so they cannot come out. There have been no more problems. (In fact, I haven’t lost another C-clip, so I think maybe it wasn’t seated properly.)